1st Communication Satellite: A Giant Space Balloon 50 Years Ago

Echo, NASA's first communications satellite, was a passive spacecraft based on a balloon design created by an engineer at NASA's Langley Research Center. Made of Mylar, the satellite measured 100 feet (30 meters) in diameter. It launched Aug. 12, 1960.

Credit: NASA

People on Earth
may take for granted today's high-tech world of cell phones, GPS and the
satellites high above the planet that make instantaneous communication
possible. But it all began 50 years ago with one giant space balloon.

Launched by
NASA, Echo
1 was a giant metallic balloon 100 feet (30 meters) across. The world's
first inflatable satellite  or "satelloon," as they were informally
known  helped lay the foundation of today's satellite communications.

"Instantaneous
global telecommunications fundamentally altered our lives, and this was the
beginning of it," said former NASA chief historian Roger Launius, a senior
curator in the space division at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington,
D.C.

A true communications
satellite

The idea behind
a communications satellite is simple: Send data up into space and beam it back
down to another spot on the globe. Echo 1 accomplished this by essentially serving
as an enormous mirror 10 stories tall that could be used to bounce
communications signals off of.

While, Echo 1
was not the first satellite to broadcast a message from space (a recorded
Christmas greeting from President Dwight Eisenhower was transmitted in December
1958 during the Project SCORE satellite test), it was the first to facilitate
two-way, live communications.

Echo 1 was made
of a 31,416 square-foot (2,918 square-meter) sheet of Mylar plastic film only
12.7 microns thick, or roughly one-tenth the width of a human hair. That sheet
was covered smoothly with 4 pounds (1.8 kg) of reflective aluminum coating.
Altogether, with inflating chemicals and two radio tracking beacons powered by
five storage batteries and 70 solar cells, the balloon weighed just 132 pounds
(59.8 kg).

The satellite
now commonly known as Echo 1 was actually formally named Echo 1A. The original
Echo 1 was destroyed after a failure in the rocket designed to launch the giant
ball into space, which scientists had dubbed Shotput.

More than a giant space
balloon

Among Echo 1's
many contributions was the first live voice communication via satellite,
delivered by none other than President Eisenhower himself.

In the radio message, Eisenhower said, "This is one more
significant step in the United States' program of space research and
exploration being carried forward for peaceful purposes. The satellite
balloon, which has reflected these words, may be used freely by any nation
for similar experiments in its own interest."

The first
coast-to-coast telephone call using a satellite was also made with Echo 1, from
one researcher to another as a test, as was the first image transmitted via
satellite: a portrait of Eisenhower.

The giant,
silvery balloon was large enough to see with the naked eye over most of the
Earth, proving brighter than most stars, and was used to help broadcast radio
transmissions across continents.

"Amateur
ham radio operators played around with it by bouncing signals off,"
Launius told SPACE.com.

Incidentally, to
communicate with Echo 1, Bell labs
created a 50-foot (15-meter), horn-shaped antenna. Later, while calibrating the
antenna, radio astronomers Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson detected cosmic
microwave background radiation, the first solid evidence of the Big Bang,
for which they won the Nobel Prize.

The satellite also proved
useful in calculations of atmospheric density and solar pressure.

The spacecraft
proved remarkably durable, surviving a meteor shower. Still, it proved
susceptible to sunlight, which could shove it around, enough to push it back
into Earth's atmosphere. It burned up on re-entry on May 24, 1968.

Although NASA
sent up a second Echo satellite for more experiments, it ultimately chose
satellites that could actively transmit data, rather than passively reflect
signals.

Still,
inflatable spacecraft are now making a comeback.

The Las
Vegas-based company Bigelow Aerospace is developing private inflatable
space habitats with the goal of launching the
first private space station in 2014. The firm has already launched two
prototype modules into space.

Charles Q. Choi is a contributing writer for Space.com and Live Science. He covers all things human origins and astronomy as well as physics, animals and general science topics. Charles has a Master of Arts degree from the University of Missouri-Columbia, School of Journalism and a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of South Florida. Charles has visited every continent on Earth, drinking rancid yak butter tea in Lhasa, snorkeling with sea lions in the Galapagos and even climbing an iceberg in Antarctica.